@Briefvoice are you factoring in the small crew increase we get from new affiliates, we have two or three species that may hit that point, I think we are up to .1 of each crew type which is not a lot but can add up over time.
@Simon_Jester you were asking why I would want a second UP facility. One of techs under Forward Defense is duplicating critical industry. Right now UP is our big shipyard and is likely the one that will be expanded the most since it tends to be cheaper and quicker to do so. In addition there seem to be some benefits for a large yard (some construction techniques work better, easier to defend). However if we go too much into UP and it gets hit there goes our industry, having a second designed yard that can be expanded like UP can ensures that opponents would have to hit two facilities to wipe our major shipyards. Of course having some yard at each member homeworld distributes it and makes strikes to cripple shipbuilding harder.
So summing up benefits of UP: less cost to expand, less time to expand yard, may benefit from construction techniques, also as a large facility it needs an Admiral of some level in charge which opens up more BeauShips positions in Starfleet for senior staff (will get to this point later)
Benefits of a second UP facility: harder for critical industry to be taken out, makes Starfleet less human dominated, also if positioned away from UP it provides a major area to repair large number of ships (also a benefit of having yards at each member world, less travel time and distance to get to a proper dock for repairs)
Now on to why I still want yards at the different member races despite thinking expanded UP as our primary (and later one of two or three primary yards as needs dictate) is it ensures we need to be hit at all our member worlds to lose production, makes it more likely a yard is close to repair our ships (and member ships and affiliate ships). And most importantly it makes Starfleet a part of the member worlds. If you watch the series what do you tend to see? Lots and lots of humans even in DS9 and Voyager when makeup and such should have been easier to do. After that the race that I see the most of is the Vulcans, the Andorians and other races are represented much less. This is also true when you consider all the admirals that we see, almost all of them are Human or Vulcan with another race every now and then. At the very least that is the impression I got from the show.
However if we look at other branches, such as diplomats, we see a much wider variety of races (likely since they come in for just an episode so are the alien of the week and costumer and makeup is not needed as much). For me though I think in universe there is another explanation. Location of Starfleet facilities most of the facilities are in Sol, the Academy, Starfleet Command, on Earth, Utopia Shipyards on Mars, the only other facilities I remember hearing about are some Science facilities on Vulcan (and even then a lot of science facilities are in Sol). Because of that at that time period humans and Vulcans buy into Starfleet more because they see Starfleet every day. Even if your parents may not be in Starfleet you likely have classmates who are in Starfleet. On top of that you have school trips to Starfleet facilities. And with Science and Ship building facilities there you can see different paths beyond serving on a starship. After all not everyone wants to serve on a starship, some people enjoy research, or engineering and in Sol and to an extent Vulcan you can actually see that being done by Starfleet. That makes it more real than just reading about it in class.
By spreading out Starbases and Shipyards to the various member worlds we work to alleviate that issue somewhat. A starbase has a lot of personnel and with a planet they can bring their families, families which will interact with the people on planet and make it so that they know someone in Starfleet, and may quite often have dinner or parties with someone from Starfleet. With shipyards there is a constant needs for workers and likely not all of them are part of Starfleet and a lot of the labor force would be local which brings them into contact with Starfleet personal everyday. It also can give them incentive to follow the stories of ships that they worked on,, especially if we keep building Excelsiors and other Explorers at each member world, some of which end up in the Explorer Corps. And that would be a big draw for a young kid, hearing about the adventures of the ship one or both of his parents worked on or maybe an aunt or uncle. And maybe that kid decides he wants to be part of that ship and joins Starfleet.
A lot of what we are doing is making Starfleet real and actual people to the different worlds, make it something they feel apart of to avoid the human dominance we see in the shows (DS9 was pretty bad about this at the end, watch the peace treaty ending the Dominion War and listen to the species they list off).
Okay switching tracks onto Seruk and why I want to bump him up to a Vice Admiral. One reason is to expand his staff. He was a Rear Admiral at game start but look at how big our fleet has expanded since then. We have now plans to have 8 explorers under construction at any given time, at game start we had 5 (one of which was the Cheron a Connie-A). We have a wave of Connie B-s under construction built a few Oberths a bunch of Centaurs and even some Mirandas and Constellations, in addition we have created three new starbases and taken over administration of the ones new members had. We have massively expanded our shipyards. Originally we had 1 3mt and 4 1mt berths. All of that means the number of Starfleet personnel has exploded. And that means BeauPers needs more people to manage all of that, and some of them need the rank to correspond to their duties but that is restricted by the guy at the top. Right now after Seruk anyone in BeauPers would be a Commodore. We now have 5 Vice Admirals (up from 4), 16 Rear Admirals listed on the front page (and Tactical likely has a few not listed, then there is Bones in charge of medical , also some in the design Bureau). What it means is that only one person has had Admiral experience at BeauPers, Seruk, and only one has Admiral level authority, Seruk once again. Sometimes they need the standing, and for that matter it is likely that there is an officer in charge of personnel for major areas such as sectors, the academy and major fleet yards like the UP. Those officers would be Commodores but they need to give orders that impact Rear Admirals. And if there needs to be a meeting where Admiral level decisions need to be made, either Seruk has to go himself or he sends a commodore who doesn't have the authority (or likely experience) since those with time in grade are more likely to be promoted and have to move to different departments.
By increasing personnel to Vice Admiral that makes it reflective of the workload that it has actually become, Seruk has done a great job there though so by bumping the position we could just give him a promotion and then get some of the people under him promotions into Rear Admiral (which makes more positions to keep the rat race going). Currently if someone in BeauPers wants to make admiral they need to leave the department, and it has been mentioned staying in grade too long can be a potential problem and can lead to retirement.
<-- my redone ledger tally for Orion costs/impacts